


Singularities

by pendrecarc



Series: Imperial Survey [2]
Category: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Genre: Backstory, Canon-Typical Violence, Citizenship, Gen, Komarr, Original Character Death(s), POV Second Person, Physics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-08
Updated: 2014-09-08
Packaged: 2018-02-12 07:08:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2100246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pendrecarc/pseuds/pendrecarc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“He considered Riva’s age. She’d been in her teens at the time of the Barrayaran conquest of Komarr, in her twenties at the time of the Revolt. She’d survived, she’d endured, she’d cooperated; her years under Imperial rule had been good, including an obviously successful live of the mind, and a single marriage. She’d compared children with Vorthys, and spoken of an eldest daughter’s upcoming wedding. No Komarran terrorist, she.”</p><p>What matters, on Komarr.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Singularities

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Tel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tel/gifts).



> Tel [requested Komarran women](http://tel.dreamwidth.org/3646.html) for Yuletide 2011 with an option on Riva, Anna Toscane, or Rebecca Galen. This has been sitting half-finished on my hard drive ever since. It's much too late for a 2012 New Year's Resolution fic, but I'm glad to have finished it.
> 
> Presented in thanks not only for the prompt but for Tel's [resources](http://archiveofourown.org/tags/Tel's%20Resources), which are incredibly useful.

On Komarr, it matters who your parents are.

Your mother is a jump pilot in one of the trade fleets and your father a technician in one of Komarr’s jumpship powerplants. He likes the curve of a dome overhead and does not take you off-world; she is often gone for months at a time and appears in your life in brief electric periods of maternal attention, and when you are five years old she takes you with her on a quick run to deliver plasma cannons to one of your neighbors. On the last jump, the co-pilot retreats indulgently to the rear of Nav & Comm so your mother can seat you in the chair beside her. A spare headset is perched awkwardly and ineffectually over your flyaway hair, and the wide viewing window fills the whole of your vision. This last is a decorative relic of a more aesthetic navigational age, entirely useless when set against the complicated monitors before your mother’s seat, but you cannot tear your eyes away.

You come through the jump with minimal queasiness (she is proud of this ability and has told you so), and the blackness of space before you is broken by the pinpoint lights of distant stars. There, right in the centre, is a not-so-distant fleck, and as your mother accelerates out of the standard jump velocity it grows into a round ball marbled with blues and browns and reds.

Your mother’s voice is weary but alert. She has explained the intricacies of jump-time in language that is technical but clear, and you have a good grasp of the reasons for her exhaustion. It will be some time before you understand how rare this comprehension is. “You see that, Tori?” she asks, looking up from the monitors to point at the approaching planet. “That’s Barrayar.”

There is something odd in the way she says it, something you have heard every time this little backwater planet comes up in conversation, a note in her voice that you are too young to understand. You will learn the reasons for it and come to recognize it as a mix of scorn and shame, and eventually you will grasp that the scorn is all the more intense _because_ of the shame. That will come later, though; for now, the word “barbarian” enters your vocabulary.

You do not go planet-side on this occasion. You stop at one of the space stations to unload the Betan weapons, then turn right back around and return to your father, who has waited anxiously all these weeks. The experience brands itself across your memory, and when two years later your mother disappears through a wormhole and a representative from Toscane Industries comes to tell you she isn’t coming back, all you can think of is the look on her face as she gathered her ship for a jump.

You want, of course, to know where she has gone. You are a curious child and don’t hesitate to ask. The answers are all fundamentally unsatisfying, and the word “platitude” enters your vocabulary. Not in the literal sense—you are a voracious reader but have not yet encountered this particular term—but in substance, you understand perfectly well what is going on.

And so you turn elsewhere for answers. Your bemused and grief-stricken father gives in to your requests for increasingly abstruse books and articles on the physics of wormhole jumps. It becomes obvious that there is nothing here to tell you what has happened to your mother, that the actual experience of five-space is as impenetrable to scientific understanding as the mysteries of death, but you have discovered a new passion. The twists and turns of theoretical physics cleave to your mind as a Necklin field does to a pilot’s. Your father is bewildered and your teachers are (variously) defensive or encouraging but (uniformly) inadequate.

You scarcely notice their reactions. Here is meaning, here is truth; but it will be years before you think of it in these terms. For now, this study serves to occupy your ravenous mind.

***

On Komarr, it matters who your patrons are.

Everyone on the planet has access to quality education. This is understood. It is also understood that some have readier access than others; this is less because it is expensive than because the guardians of higher learning are difficult to impress, and you are far likelier to catch their notice if someone bearing a particular surname takes an interest in your fate.

When you are ten years old, the mathematics teachers at your modest school throw up their hands and decide to make you someone else’s problem. You are tossed like a live plasma grenade between mentors of increasing abilities, and though you don’t realize it at the time your name is bandied about at dinner-parties attended by planetary shareholders with both the interest and the financial weight to support the expansion of Komarran intellectual pursuits.

You are terribly gifted and terribly fortunate, and soon you have caught the attention of not one, but two individuals who can, if they choose, make life very easy for you indeed: Rebecca Galen (of _those_ Galens) and Anna Toscane (of _those_ Toscanes).

These redoubtable women are not the sort to throw money at a cause and watch it from a distance. They want to meet you, to meet your teachers, and to gauge the return on their investment as regularly as they do the progress of their trade fleets. They want to groom you for life as something more than the average planetary shareholder, and they are willing to expend more than mere money to do so.

“You owe something to Komarr,” says Rebecca Galen on your thirteenth birthday. That morning Sera Toscane took you shopping in the more exclusive boutiques in the Solstice dome and bought you clothing that will look just as out-of-place at Solstice University, where you now spend most of your waking hours, as the child’s trousers and tunics that already fill your wardrobe. This extravagant generosity has caused your father some discomfort, but he doesn’t feel he is in a position to object.

Rebecca Galen has taken you to her neat, sparsely furnished home in a shining high-rise. She serves you tea, plants one of her young nephews on your lap, and lectures you about the future of your planet.

“You owe something,” she says, “because more than any other planet in the Nexus, Komarr has to fight for its every breath. You owe every second of your life to the careful planning and ceaseless diligence of generations of shareholders before you. We are always a hairsbreadth from utter disaster. Never forget that.”

Little David stares at you, gnawing contemplatively on his fist. You stare back down at him. Children make you uncomfortable. You choose not to classify yourself as one of them.

“What do I owe?” you ask. You are uncertain how you feel about designer clothing, but you are absolutely certain that you would rather be running sims in the university labs than having this conversation.

“Only what each shareholder owes; your resources and talents. Yours are considerable. So, you may have noticed, is the investment we have made in them. We expect appreciation in value. Not for our own sake,” she clarifies, “but for David’s. For your children’s. For the shareholders in the first generation to open the glass doors of these domes and walk out into the open air, and for the firm intention we have that that hope will someday be a reality.

“We’ve built a working society out of nothing—out of less than nothing. Our resources are held in deep space and in the wit and intellect of our shareholders. We have no room to take our gifts for granted. That, my dear, brilliant child, is the essence of patronage. Do not take it for granted.”

David Galen removes his fist from his mouth with a wet, sucking plop. He wraps saliva-slick fingers around the lapels of the new jacket that cost more than your father makes in a month. The late afternoon light from the soletta array streams in through the windows.

Counselor Galen rests her elbows on the table and regards you intently. Your mother would have liked her, though this has not yet occurred to you. “What will you do for Komarr?”

You do not have an answer for her.

Two weeks later, the heavens open and rain down plasma fire.

***

On Komarr, it matters who your associates are.

The war does not affect your life as much as you might have expected. You continue to attend lectures at the university, spending as much time in the labs as they will allow. Your father begins working longer hours as the powerplants reach and exceed capacity. He is rarely home when you are. You do not mind this very much; you rarely have much to talk about when you are both there.

Your attitude towards Barrayar quickly mirrors that of the older students and faculty with whom you spend most of your time. They are irritated, more than anything, at the disruptions to their work, at the resources that are siphoned off toward the defense of your planet, at the blatant, Betan hypocrisy of championing human rights with one hand while the other manufactures arms for those warmongering barbarians.

(Do not think too hard about where those weapons came from. Do not recall that Komarr controls the sole route into and out of Barrayar and what has been done with that control, and certainly don’t remember your mother’s long ago delivery of plasma cannons. Whatever you do, don’t consider the ways in which this war is of Komarr’s own making.)

Then the soletta array is taken, and attitudes change; disdain becomes despair, though it loses none of the contempt your people still have for your backwards neighbors. And then comes the war in the cities.

It is over almost as soon as it has begun. The counsellors fold one by one; the cities open their doors to the Barrayarans because closing them means closing out air and funds as well. Barrayar’s years of isolation stripped it of intellect and humanity, but they taught it to survive. Komarr is a deep-space oasis of all that is progressive and sophisticated, but cut off from the rest of the Nexus, it is nothing.

One afternoon there is an announcement that the laboratories and libraries are closing early. All citizens of Solstice are strongly encouraged to return to their homes and wait until further news is given. Public transportation is at a standstill, and green-uniformed men stand at every corner. You have never seen a nerve disruptor in person before. The Barrayarans carry them openly and casually, as though it is nothing to bear the power to end another person’s life.

One of your professors sees you safely home. You find your father sitting ashen-faced by the comm screen. For the first time in you cannot remember how long, you go to him and he holds you close, and the two of you listen to the news trickling in from a gymnasium not far from where you live.

You do not see Rebecca Galen again.

You do see Anna Toscane.

Solstice is still a commercial hub, and the Barrayarans are anxious that money should continue to flow through the city as quickly as it did before. They could not collect so much in tariffs if it did not. With the money comes concerts and dinners. She invites you to some of these so you can continue to meet the right sort of people, and it seems to you that the outward trimmings of this life have not changed a great deal since the invasion.

On one of these occasions, she hands you a tall flute of sparkling wine and sits you down at a quiet table. For once she is not surrounded by the flock of aides and press and business partners she so often trails in her wake. You have her undivided attention and are not quite sure what to do with it.

"Are you making good use of that particle compressor?” she asks. You personally have nothing to do with the new particle compressor, but it was funded out of a grant awarded by Toscane Industries, and you understand that she is lumping you in with the entirety of Solstice University's scientific interests.

You express the university's gratitude, and she laughs at you. "Oh, I'll bet they're grateful," she says. "Relieved, more like. That was the idea; reassure them the new Komarr won't forget the necessity of scientific research."

"The new Komarr, or Barrayar?" you ask.

She shrugs. "It's not so fine a distinction right now, but wait a few generations and see how much it matters." You look down at your hands. "What are they saying, at that University of yours?"

"About what?"

"About the Toscanes,” she says, "and about where the money for that compressor came from." When you can't come up with a reply, she shakes her head. "Never mind. I know what they're saying. They're right, too, so far as it goes; I've sold out to Barrayar in ways the Galens never will. Does that bother you?" It does, but again she doesn't need you to tell her this. "But I note the University has still taken my money. My name won't wind up on a memorial to Komarran defiance, and I don't want it to. I have nieces and nephews of my own. What future do you think I owe them?" She raises her glass to inspect the bubbling liquid. "This came from a vineyard on Barrayar’s Southern Continent. There are no grapes on Komarr, you know. Wait a few generations. See how much it matters."

It is at this point that the word ‘collaborator’ enters your vocabulary.

***

On Komarr, it matters who your partners are.

You navigate the social landscape of your teens and early twenties with about as much grace as might be expected of a woman whose peers are twice her age. Along with two doctorates, you accumulate a series of one-night stands and brief relationships until you decide it simply isn’t worth the effort you could be putting into research. You pass whole months without a single conversation on any topic other than the latest trends in five-space theory, until an inexplicably persistent biochemist with whom you occasionally share an elevator convinces you to get a drink with him.

He is intelligent and attractive and perhaps a little too aware of both these things. The bar is crowded, and the music pulses in your abdomen so you can scarcely hear his conversation over the beat. What you can make out is mostly interdepartmental gossip with the occasional tangent into his latest paper in some biomedical journal you’ve never heard of and have no intention of reading. You order another drink, and he leans in close to brush his fingertips against your wrist and drop a confident kiss against the exposed skin of your neck.

You hold back a sigh and glance over his shoulder, and there you see her watching you; two dark eyes and a sweep of short hair, a knowing half-smile that mixes challenge and invitation. When he leaves for the toilets, she comes and takes his seat and does not leave. Presumably he comes back out some minutes later, but you don’t notice, and he does not trouble you again.

Her name is Francesca. She is a student of ancient literature, which you find charming in its uselessness until you encounter the razor’s edge of her intellect and find your preconceptions sliced neatly in half. She never shortens your name, like your father does, like your mother did. Instead she gives equal weight to each of its syllables, 'Vit-tor-i-a’ spilling out in her rich contralto and cracking the facade of your scientific detachment.

“We should all learn Italian,” she murmurs one evening. You laugh. Her voice and eyes are softened by wine, and the harsh artificial light of your office has been transformed into a yellow glow. She moves her chair closer, regarding you intently. “No, I mean it. You especially. I’ll teach you.”

You lean back in your own chair and cross your arms across your chest. “We’d be better off if everyone learned physics.”

She makes a face of such disgust that you want to be offended, because you mean this, too. There is such beauty in abstraction, in complexity, in logic, and not enough people appreciate it. You search for the words to explain this and come up short, or perhaps it’s only your embarrassment at how earnest this makes you feel.

You take another sip of your wine and borrow words from another physicist. “Mathematics is the language God used to write the universe.” You leaven this declaration with a faint and flippant smile. When you say ‘God’, you are being ironic. The rest of it is accurate.

She takes your wine away and runs her hand up your side. You catch your breath. “But when he wrote the human soul, he used Italian.” You can’t decide if she is being ironic or not. The question becomes academic as she moves to straddle you, her body sliding against yours, and leans closer to whisper in your ear: “ _Per grazia fa noi grazia che disvele a lei la bocca tua, sì che discerna la seconda bellezza_ —” And her hand slips down. “— _che tu cele_.”

She opens up your narrow world just at a time when it would probably be wiser to stay locked in the controlled environment of your work. There is rebellion in the streets, bombs exploding in cafes you have frequented, Barrayarans in riot gear replacing the tolerably familiar uniforms of Dome Security. Swept up in Francesca’s wake, you find yourself attending a series of disorganized protests, then a rather better-organized rally at which she screams herself hoarse and you clutch the sign someone has thrust into your hands with a churning mix of fear, anger, and exhilaration. The first impression is easily explained, the latter two less so. You try in vain to trace their origins either to the press of the swelling crowd or to some latent patriotic fervor you didn’t realize you possessed. The fever pitch of protest eddies about you. You chart its vectors as well as you can, magnitude growing and shrinking in proportion to the competence of the speakers, direction rotating with the arrival of military vehicles on the periphery.

Despite your best efforts at observation, the tipping point is as intangible as it is inevitable; the equation goes asymptotic, and the Barrayarans start firing into the protestors.

Stunners only, but the result is still an accumulation of unconscious bodies and an outpouring of mass panic. You lose Francesca almost at once, find yourself forced out to the edge of the screaming crowd, and at length are shoved up against the perimeter of uniformed crowd control. One of the men puts his stunner right in your face. You react without thought, scrabbling at his wrist, and he sends you to the ground with a hard blow to the side of the head and a boot in your ribs. You are one of the first to be packed into the armored transport vans. Just before the door closes, you hear the zap of stunners give way to the sound of plasma fire, and then the screaming, horrifically, stops.

The detention cells are dank and crowded and miserable. Along with the others, you submit to processing and a series of invasive questions about your personal associates and political history. Your interrogator is a young lieutenant with a guttural accent and a bored expression. Another man sits in the corner, his collar studded with twin silver eyes, his strong-jawed face too blank to show actual contempt.

_You see that, Tori? That’s Barrayar._

When you have answered every question for the third time, the ImpSec officer leans forward. “You’re free to go. A representative from Toscane Industries is here to collect you.”

His eyes--both pairs--follow you to the door.

Embarrassing, to have your bail posted by Sera Toscane, whose lackeys surely have better things to do. But you make full use of the opportunity, dragging the lawyer between jails and detention centers until you have located Francesca. She is released to you, shaking with fury but blessedly unharmed, and turns to spit in the face of the guard who’s just removed her wrist restraints.

His expression freezes, trained not on her but on the security scanners near the entrance, and there is a brief discontinuity in the passage of time. When it resumes its normal curvature you are coughing up a lungful of plascrete dust, and your ears ring with the echoes of the grenade. The Barrayaran guard lies stretched atop you, his weight pressing you into cracked tile, his blood pooling centimeters from your eyes.

You and Francesca lie curled together that night and listen to the news agencies tallying up the dead. “I hate them,” she says brokenly, childishly, and begins to cry.

 _Ti amo_ , you think for the first time.

That is the closest you will ever come to involvement in the revolt. You seek refuge in your work, interrupted only occasionally by explosions from other parts of the campus, and once during your usual mid-afternoon walk when you cross paths with that attractive biochemist whose name you have forgotten. His hands are secured behind his back, and he is flanked by a pair of ImpSec officers.

You look him up afterward. A full list of the charges against him is not presented until the revolt dies down nearly two years later; he has not been heard from him since he was taken into custody. By then you have lost what meager taste for politics you might once have possessed.

***

On Komarr, it matters who your shareholders are.

Solstice University has always been good to you, and when you are offered tenure at the tender age of twenty-six you accept without hesitation. In exchange for your occasional attention to a rotating crop of graduate students and a controlling interest in your intellectual output, they present you with a constant stream of grant monies and a degree of long-term security. These benefits gain new appeal in light of your recent engagement. Francesca has started to talk about children. (Your father, who you’ve come to suspect prefers her to you in any case, would probably love her for that alone.)

You yield papers at a rate that sends your department chair into raptures. The students, meanwhile, are a more interesting use of your time than you expected. You approach them much as your mother approached her familial duties, diving in with blazing intensity when it occurs to you to do so, then retreating for long periods to solitary work.

Until your daughter is born.

She tugs at your jacket and looks at you with bright, curious eyes. _And what have I done for Komarr?_ you wonder, touching her cheek with the back of your fingertips.

It is not an instant process, this offering of yourself to parenthood and to citizenship. You still crave--still need, to give of yourself most fully--long unbroken hours in the company of your own mind. But you are coming at last to the understanding that being a planetary shareholder is not a one-way transaction. Between them, they have bought up the pieces of you: Komarr and your child, the University and your wife, the Toscanes and the Galens, your father and your work. You are a long-term investment, and it is high time you started paying dividends.

With time and effort, you earn a reputation as a brilliant collaborator, drawing mathematicians and engineers and post-quantum neoclassicists into the orbit of pure five-space theory and flinging them out again to wreak revolutionary havoc in their own disciplines. You learn to regard your students’ minds as subjects as worthy of attention as your wormhole models, developing as keen an admiration for elegance in the transfer of knowledge as for the formulation of a proof. You correspond with scientists from Beta, Escobar, Sergyar, and even Barrayar itself. You cultivate your children’s hearts and bodies together with their minds. Slowly, and with a great deal of work from both ends, you develop a real relationship with your father.

You have begun at last to appreciate in value.

***

On Komarr, it matters who your competitors are.

Years pass. The average annual temperature outside the domes ekes up a full degree. Life inside the domes is rich and fulfilling, interrupted every so often by the usual minor catastrophes of a comfortable human existence, hemmed in only slightly by the knowledge that your planet flourishes at the sufferance of your isolated neighbors. At your oldest daughter’s engagement party, you raise a glass of champagne to bless the union. The wine is the very finest from Barrayar’s Southern Continent, compliments of Toscane Industries.

The fiancé is a former student of yours, and when the toast segues into increasingly technical--not to mention sexual--puns on the nature of wormholes, the whole table follows with appreciative laughter. You resume your seat.

Francesca reaches for another bottle, opening it just as the light begins to fade. The cork pops out into a horrified silence. You crowd with your guests at the windows, craning your necks for a glimpse of the soletta array as it folds slowly into itself, collapsing like a crumpled flimsy.

In its own way, the accident is more disruptive than when the Barrayarans first captured the array. Those of you old enough to remember the war wait with a low, simmering tension for the other boot to drop.

The sequel comes not publicly or politically to the whole of Komarr but privately and academically, when a colleague invites--or more accurately, requests and requires--your help with an interesting five-space problem at a secure location. You accept with alacrity. Vorthys always has a satisfying conundrum on offer.

The puzzle this time is more than mathematical. Vorthys has brought a colleague, an odd little man with the devil’s name and an unlikely résumé. You renew your oath of loyalty after a brief hesitation born more of embarrassment than dismay, then offer an additional oath of secrecy with a sideways look at the ImpSec officers posted at the entrances of the experiment station.

The mathematical puzzle is a _very_ good one, though. You dive in eagerly with Vorthys and Yuell, batting questions and hypotheses and contradictions across the table, tweaking simulations on the comconsole until the problem takes hold of your mind for its own sake. You manage, for a time, to forget that this device ripped half the sun from the sky and focus entirely on the impossibility of perpetual motion. You get to your feet, pacing up and down a solitary corridor until the blood is flowing as well as you could ask for but still nothing circulates through your brain but the same illogical half-conclusions. You pause, gazing out across the cold and oxygen-starved landscape, breathing recycled air. Long minutes pass before you become aware of your audience.

He is not what you expected, this younger Vorkosigan. You give up battering yourself against Vorthys’ intractable problem and approach the little Auditor head-on instead, curious to learn who or what might possess the controlling interest in a man like this. You poke at his pressure-points in the same way you would adjust key parameters of your simulations. No explosion results, to your surprise, just the unfolding of an intriguing personality. He redirects the conversation, and then you break for lunch.

You count a number of odd personalities among your acquaintance, but rarely have you shared a table with an assortment like this. The conversation is casual and amusing enough to be surreal; you find yourself entertained by an ImpSec Major’s stories, then giggling at a revolting description of military rations delivered in the Emperor’s Voice. You wonder what would have happened if you’d prodded at little harder at Vorkosigan, if you’d applied just the right amount of force in just the right place, if you’d achieved critical resonance and he’d--

Oh.

The revelation presents itself neatly, the elegant conclusion to a messy dilemma. What did Vorthys call it, anti-engineering? Certainly destruction is an easier, a less worthy goal than creation, and this applies to wormholes as much as anything else. But this is something new, something abstractly beautiful and tidy whatever the accidental side-effects of the testing phase. And its true application, yes, you see it now, as who among the shareholders of this particular planet would not?

_What do I owe to Komarr?_

In a sense, the past forty years have been a continuation of two conversations, one held over tea in a modest apartment and the other over champagne at a glittering benefit dinner. You thought, you truly thought, you had found the answer, a reply you could make to Councilwoman Galen and Sera Toscane in the same breath. Now the path diverges. The wormhole your mother once traveled has admitted weapons and devastation, death and tyranny; but it has also brought Vorthys and his quick, interested mind, the students that fill your lecture hall, the unlikely Imperial merger of Vorbarra and Toscane that hints at unprecedented dividends and brighter days to follow. A word from you could preserve that future, for better or worse. Your silence could blot the barbarians from the sky and offer—what, in exchange?

This is not a responsibility Rebecca Galen or Anna Toscane could have anticipated.

When the matter is taken out of your hands, you do not know whether to be relieved. You do manage indignation. Even your brief detention during the revolt did not result in interrogation under fast-penta. The drug provides an odd clarity, a brief illumination of the device’s energy flow and feedback better than any comconsole sim, and with it a flood of insight. It is an extraordinary experience. The (lamentably?) departed Radovas has broken your field wide open, and even as the fast-penta antagonist sets in with the realization of just how much trouble you are about to be in, your mind sings with the possibilities.

The political sequel is anticlimactic. The wormhole collapser will not, in fact, collapse; you receive an offhand Auditorial pardon and are deposited on Francesca’s doorstep in an unmarked ImpSec vehicle; no secondary space disaster follows. Whatever indignity was done from you, whatever terrible choice you were not allowed to make, you have new physics to explore.

Much later, when word comes from Sergyar of the Butcher’s death, you observe the private and public reactions with interest, considering what they would have been if this had happened twenty or ten or even five years ago. Times have changed. You are a product of your era and feel a quick pang of satisfaction, little more.

You would probably not think about it again, but your last conversations with his son keep coming to mind. You remember that there were never any repercussions for your treasonous silence, and you consider that under very different circumstances you might have liked to cultivate that acquaintance.

You would like to discuss your reaction with Francesca, but she is tired and irritable, has been for weeks, so you retreat instead to your lab where you keep an inked pen and a few expensive sheets of actual paper saved for just such occasions. Wood products are a luxury, but some customs have been preserved even through centuries of space colonization. The personal touch of a handwritten letter still means something. You choose your words with care to convey respect rather than sorrow—there is no intimacy here, and you do not wish to seem insincere—and dispatch the letter the next day.

A response comes in due time. It contains studied courtesy and no reference to your last encounter. Probably written by a secretary; he is still grieving. You read it once, distractedly, and discard it without another thought, because just that morning your wife received a call from her doctors. The only relevant data points are the results of her bloodwork and the words _six months, on the outside_.

Now, nearing sixty, with decades of marriage and several children under your belt, you learn what it is to be desperately in love. You discover a new metric for the passage of time as each second becomes infinitely precious and infinitely appalling, marking the approach of the date the physicians have calculated as the last you will spend together. Your own equations have no place here, in this unexplored realm that Newtonian and Einsteinian and five-space physics all fail to describe, and the unaccustomed dyscalculia sends you reeling as much as the diagnosis itself. The clock runs down, her mind fades, her body withers. She holds you close and breathes lines of ancient poetry into your ear as though this borrowed beauty is the last thing she will give up. “ _Nel suo profondo vidi che s'interna legato con amore in un volume, ciò che per l'universo si squaderna_ ,” she whispers, eyes fixed on yours, “ _sustanze e accidenti e lor costume, quasi conflati insieme_ ….”

When it is over, her remains are collected by the prosaically-named Department of Organic Waste Disposal to be processed and offered to the ground outside. Substances and accidents, indeed. Bodily entropy is the right and responsibility of all planetary shareholders, dividends from her final investment to be reaped hundreds of years from now.

The thought brings no consolation. You wall yourself up in work, ignoring messages of sympathy that float in from friends and colleagues across the Nexus, resisting your father’s attempts to draw you out. Your children have other supports, and they can manage well enough without borrowed strength you cannot supply. You feel no sharp pangs of grief, just a months-long deadness of spirit that translates into mental sterility.

Into this creative impasse falls another letter, hand-delivered by Imperial courier and sealed by a crisp circle of wax with a brownish smear in the center. It refers apologetically to the lack of grace in the first response and offers nicely-phrased condolences of his own. You spend little time on these. The last two paragraphs are by far the most interesting.

> _I heard somewhere that occupation is the best antidote to grief. I’m not actually certain that’s true, but it is at least the only thing that’s ever worked for me. I suspect we have that in common. If you find yourself in need of a new direction, may I first recommend that you drop by the new headquarters of the Imperial Survey in Solstice? I’m told their five-space mathematicians are puzzling over an odd set of data and could use an expert opinion. Feel free to tell them you’re come at my recommendation, though I doubt my name could open any doors there that yours would not._
> 
> _I’ve also sent the enclosed. It was easy enough to come by—I have my ways—but explaining it to a third party might be difficult. I should say a certain third party, who tolerates my methods more than he probably should but reserves the right to question them at his pleasure. I hope you’ll be both careful and productive in its use._

  
Your sense of curiosity is rusty, but it stirs as you turn to examine “the enclosed,” a flat box about the right size to contain another one of the innumerable elegant lightpens people will insist on giving you. You slide back the lid and find instead a standard hypospray and a pair of small vials. Lifting one from its protective bedding, you turn the label to the light.

It takes you a moment to realize what you’re holding. When you do, it startles a laugh from your throat. Your reaction wavers between affront and amusement before arriving at something that feels a great deal like delight. You roll the vial of fast-penta between your fingers, and a bubble floats from one end to another.

What a ridiculous gift. _Here is meaning,_ you think, as you once did of mathematics. _Here is truth._ Though that’s not quite right, as Francesca would have told you. Truth we can find in the elegance of a proof or the brute force of a drug. Meaning is what we make of it.

The laugh peters into a smile, then fades into a warm glow, and this settles deep in your chest. “ _Bene,_ ” you say aloud, tucking the vial into its box.

You pick up a pen and turn back to your work.

**Author's Note:**

> The quote in the summary is from _Komarr_.
> 
> “Mathematics is the language God used to write the universe” - I’ve seen this attributed to Galileo with slightly different wording, but I can’t find the source. Possibly it’s just a shortened version of the passage quoted in [this article](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Assayer).
> 
>  _Per grazia fa noi grazia che disvele a lei la bocca tua, sì che discerna la seconda bellezza che tu cele_ is a (mis)quotation of Purgatorio 31.136-138: “[Out of your grace, do us this grace; unveil/ your lips to [her], so that [she] may discern/ the second beauty you have kept concealed](http://dante.ilt.columbia.edu/comedy/).”
>
>>   
>  _Nel suo profondo vidi che s'interna_   
>  _legato con amore in un volume,_   
>  _ciò che per l'universo si squaderna:_
>> 
>>  
>> 
>> _sustanze e accidenti e lor costume,_  
>  _quasi conflati insieme, per tal modo_  
>  _che ciò ch'i' dico è un semplice lume._
>> 
>>  
>> 
>> In its profundity I saw-ingathered  
> and bound by love into one single volume-  
> what, in the universe, seems separate, scattered:
>> 
>> substances, accidents, and dispositions  
> as if conjoined-in such a way that what  
> I tell is only rudimentary.
>> 
>> \- _Paradiso_ 33.085-090  
> 


End file.
